Linux Foundation forms Ceph Foundation for open-source storage

Driven in part by the increased use of containers, AI and ML, the Linux Foundation announced the formation of the Ceph Foundation for open-source storage.

Ceph is being used by cloud providers and enterprises to lower the cost of storing information in private clouds while helping them better organize and access their information. The Ceph Foundation is developing a unified distributed storage system that will provide applications with high availability to object, block and file system interfaces.

According to the Linux Foundation press release, unstructured data accounts for more than 80% of enterprise data, which is growing at rate of 55% to 65% a year. Block and file storage systems play a key role in keeping data organized and are crucial components of infrastructure platforms such as Kubernetes and OpenStack. According to an OpenStack survey, roughly two-thirds of OpenStack clouds use Ceph block storage.

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The growth of new cloud, container, artificial intelligence and machine learning applications are propelling the use of Ceph. For example, an enterprise could combine Ceph with analytics and machine learning to comb through large amounts of unstructured data to in order to spot patterns related to customer behavior, online customer conversations and potential noncompliance scenarios.

“Ceph has a long track record of success when it comes to helping organizations with effectively managing high growth and expanding data storage demands,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, in a prepared statement. “Under the Linux Foundation, the Ceph Foundation will be able to harness investments from a much broader group to help support the infrastructure needed to continue the success and stability of the Ceph ecosystem.”

In addition to cloud providers and enterprises, financial institutions, academic and government institutions, telecommunications infrastructure providers, manufacturers, and software solution providers also use Ceph.

Cisco, Bloomberg, BMW. Duetsche Telekom, Rackspace, SAP, Salesforce SK Telecom and ZTE are among the current users of Ceph.

Ceph is also used by Rook, which is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project that enables provisioning of file, block and object storage services into the Kubernetes environment, running the Ceph storage infrastructure in containers alongside applications that are consuming that storage.

The official formation of the Ceph Foundation followed on the heels of the Ceph Advisory Board, which was created three years ago.